Interview

Caroline Sharpless (NAP #108) paints interior spaces, breathing life into the very heart of the walls and architectural environments she creates. Her rooms oscillate between featuring mundane, muted colors lacking details and interiors highlighting bold bursts of jewel tones with precise intricacies. Both styles tap into and recall familiar memories we all have from the spaces we have inhabited, visited, or come to know.

These spaces seem to carry a human presence, as if some very essence of our earthly being has seeped into their walls. Her paintings remind me of the feelings we have all encountered when packing up an apartment or home. There is always a moment during that process when we stand back and look at the space and see it stripped down to its bare architectural form – furniture, décor, and memories all neatly packed away. And there is always a pang of longing and bittersweet realization, for me at least, that somehow I no longer belong in this space I once called home.

In his recently opened exhibition hoodwinked by brand impersonators, malicious account spoofers and counterfeiters in the Roberts & Tilton Project Room in Culver City, CA, Albuquerque-based artist Jonathan Hartshorn's latest body of work references a variety of subject matter including Susan Rothenberg, Eadweard Muybridge and the boomerang. After a recent studio visit, we had the opportunity to discuss his new work and some of the other many aspects that make up his practice. – Claude Smith, Albuquerque/Santa Fe Contributor

Painting can be held as the grand reconciliation of time and history that it is built to be. Dennis Congdon takes this approach as a highly held belief, an admiration of sorts for what image, color and surface can offer; a meandering pile of faded thoughts and sun bleached inspiration. Congdon’s work strikes me as coming from a place that only hind sight can provide. A certain, “Hey, pal, I haven’t seen it all but I’ve seen enough to know that there’s gotta be more to all of this.” A long vision is at play here. Yes, things fall apart but only after they had come together. Congdon’s paintings border this celebration, dancing around fluorescent flames, caressing not what was lost but left behind. His work presents us with a place that we may not know but will eventually have to welcome. Like it or not. – Arthur Peña, Dallas Contributor

Artists come and go, and so do galleries. Last week gallery owner Kristen Dodge announced that DODGEgallery, which has been in operation since 2010 in New York City’s bustling Lower East Side arts district, was closing shop. The news took a lot of people, including myself, by surprise. - Steven Zevitas, Publisher

Something about Paige Jiyoung Moon’s (NAP #109) paintings stays with you. They are colorful, inviting, and familiar – and in them Moon captures her everyday experiences and environments in a way that is playful and realistic.

It isn’t her style that is particularly naturalistic though, it is her subject matter. Her style is slightly exaggerated in perspective, as she often places viewers so that it feels as if we are hovering above the scene, looking down on it from afar. Her paintings make me consider memories and memory-making – how we experience a day, how we remember it, and how we reconstruct it in our minds.

On the converse of the everyday, though, Moon also creates a dreamlike quality in her work, because as we hover over images of her painted memories – of a screen printing class, or a hike through Sequoia, or a weekend hotel stay – it conjures a memory-bank full of my own recollections from such classes, hikes, and trips. It is personal and voyeuristic, everyday and evocative, and ephemeral eye candy that leaves me wanting to spend a day in the life of (or with) Moon. – Ellen C. Caldwell, Los Angeles Contributor

Jon Reed (NAP #109) paints objects – very ornate objects to be specific. His paintings are bright, bold, and full of rich contrasts in their depictions of opulent material goods found at two of the most famous collectors’-homes-turned-museums in California: The Getty Villa and Hearst Castle.

Even if you didn’t know the furniture sources for some of his paintings, they immediately recall the lavish and ornamental furniture and chairs you might only find in a wealthy collector’s home or museum. Reed takes three-dimensional furniture and various architectural spaces and captures them in time and space as flattened, two-dimensional paintings. Doing so, Reed simultaneously does something interesting to our eye and the way we read the paintings, calling our attention to both their “objectness” and their exact “non-objectness” all at once. - Ellen C. Caldwell, Los Angeles Contributor

Something to consider: How does Painting handle love? Or better yet, can a painting be infused with love? Raychael Stine (NAP #78) believes that a painting that comes from a place of love can serve a greater function beyond an innocuous object. Painting can be used to cope and sometimes that coping deals with issues that pertain to love. I don’t remember the last time someone used the “L” word when speaking about their practice as it may come off as trite. But at the same time are we so cynical not to believe that painting and love do not go hand in hand? Stine pushes beyond these initial queries to a place where life, and love, is reaffirmed through the act of painting. - Arthur Peña, Dallas Contributor

We trace history in a similar way we trace source. The significance of certain symbols have a sense of time to them, which is neither part of the object, nor a prescription onto the object – but an affect of belonging, in a condensed perspective, from a certain point in time. This is how a lot of subjects in pre-modern painting history operate. However, how we are able to codify and redact certain elements in this history as belonging to a stylized moment is always overthrown by quotation. Styles are recycled, borrowed, and misplaced within a linear timeline – as if painters were forever throwing the images within the current object they are painting into the cannon of the past by sampling tropes and motifs of another time.

Conor Backman is a versatile painter who is able to engage with this cannon, while still existing very much in the present. The sense of time in his paintings belongs to various moments at once, carrying the significance of pre-modern subjects that once operated as symbols, the preoccupation with flatness as a form discovered with modernism, and the post-modern all-over appropriation that works its way into how we deal with mediated space through a different, more contemporary lens of painting. Like most artists whose work I discover, I first accessed Backman’s work online. His work can also be viewed in person in Fruits/Flowers/Appliances, currently on view at LVL3. Below is the record of a series of conversations we had on ideas of flatness, painting as trade, trompe l’oeil, and levels of mediation and reduction in representational painting. – Stephanie Cristello, Chicago Contributor

The Tamarind Institute was founded in 1960 by June Wayne with the intent of revitalizing and elevating the status of lithography in the U.S.; It moved to Albuquerque in 1970 where it became affiliated with the University of New Mexico. With a strong focus on research, education, collaborative exchange and experimentation, Tamarind has undeniably changed the course of lithography through its 54 years of operation.

Fresh off a couple of high-profile exhibitions at Susan Vielmetter in Los Angeles and DUVE Berlin, New York-based painter Hayal Pozanti made a brief stop in Albuquerque in late-January for a week-long printmaking residency at the Tamarind Institute. Her efforts resulted in several monotypes and two lithographs that will be editioned later this spring. During her visit, we had the opportunity to talk about her experience at Tamarind as her first foray into lithography. – Claude Smith, Albuquerque/Santa Fe Contributor

Christopher Kane Taylor’s (NAP #108) work is bright, bold, humorous, and impulsive. His sentiments, scrawled in an almost-exaggerated hand-painted form, address his life, concerns, and future. While humorous at times, this text is also deep and thought provoking.

After Taylor was recently featured in NAP, I couldn’t stop thinking about some of his paintings and his resonating words, so I spoke to Taylor about his process and inspiration behind his works… - Ellen C. Caldwell

Current Issue

Blog

When I met Nina Chanel Abney on the occasion of her FOCUS show at The Modern in Fort Worth, she had just returned from South Africa where she spent three weeks. This much needed vacation was taken after her...

God, let's just start with a list, right?, and if it seems a bit daunting, just imagine poor fucking Linnaeus, setting forth to categorize sundry and all living things, whereas this is but a brief run-down...